Also this is a board for peoples opinion on this "new" EQ. So dude telling people to STFU needs to go somewhere else. This is for opinion, which so far is EQ2 is gonna suck ***....and i think it is too :) i hate the whole lvl to become what you want thing like dark age and weapons breaking is ************** thing i can't stand about diablo. Plus no twinking...i hate to say it but 99.9% of the people on EQ love to twink, feels good wearing a fungi at lvl1. The game isn't out yet so i got a feeling they will change it alot when they see all the negative feedback. It would be awesome if they would just keep it more like the original EQ, i know its a new game and all....but sometimes the old way is better. I still can't find anything better than EQ as in online multi, just getting tired of seeing the same old thing and hearing the same ole terms. A whole new world with whole new items would be cool. Different classes and races would be cool too. And even though i don't put as much time into the game as i used to....still gonna take offense to the people that say play it or don't play it, it doesn't matter if its working on a car or playing a video game or a job....if oyu put time into it, and money like EQ players have to VI and Sony....we should have some say. So you can STFU.

No, you can pretty much bet we can't. EQ2 won't even have the same type of characters, you don't have stats you pick to start, etc. Keeping the same charcters would make the reason for building an entire new game moot, the way the original characters were coded is part of the reason.

Its not a waste of time, do you really think with Star wars galaxies, world of warcraft, Vaporbane(oops, shadow),City of heroes and whatever else that you'd still be playing EQ in a year and a half with newer/better things to choose from? This is a video game, its not an equity investment.

/cheer now you got the idea!

"I think they should just keep adding onto good old EQ.
There is no reason to start over, it "

EQ has a ceiling that they run into time and time again, that ceiling is a game engine from 1999 which can't change that much and still leave things like the character files in the same condition.

1. Changing the game too much changes the characters to the point where they'd have to wipe the charater files

2. If they are going to wipe the character files, they may as well build a fully new better EQ

3. this is what they are doing, it is the correct thing to do.

Do you remember how for years they said they could not fix the hybrid or hell level xp problems? Well, they can't. In fact they did not fix them, they fudged around them. The xp table is still the same and still has the problems. All they did was use voodoo math after the fact to muliply or divide xp earned. In the example of hybrids they just take any xp the hybrid gets X 1.4 = the 40 percent deficit that hybrids have on the xp table.

The above is an example of a problem with the EQ engine that they MANAGED to work around in the only way possible. Its not a clean way, its not a good way and its not the way you'd like to use as a programmer. Its essentially a stuck on band-aid solution, but it was fine for those two problems.

However, there are only going to be SO many things that they can change in the same way. Another example of a hardcoded problem is the everquest engine non ability to have anything go above 255. 255 is the max bit or whatever thing a majig (i have no idea what the hell I'm talking about but a programmer could tell you) Dan enright, the head tradeskill guy, was at the most recent EQ fan faire talking about this. Someone asked about tradeskills going higher and he said that they won't go higher than 250 because frankly 255 is the HARD LIMIT that they could go to anyway with the EQ engine. In fact 255 is the limit for ANYTHING to be (wis, int, you name it) and still work.

Once again, anything they change much means that our characters change. Anything else they change much means that they are basically rebuilding the game. Rather than totally fix the millions of dated things from old mmorpg design that EQ has from 1999, have the huge headache of trying to convert millions of characters to an updated engine in the best way possible, being held back all that time by the residue of an old non optimzied engine, at some point its obvious that instead its best to just make something new.

Its pretty much compareable to upgradeing your PC. Right now maybe you have 512 meg of ram and a good graphics card and case and all you need is a new proc and mb, swap in all the other stuff, voila! new computer for today's games. However, soon the next new proc type comes out and it needs rambus ram or whatever and a fully new kind of MB and some day of course they will even likely once again need a new case and power supply (and sometime later even a new hard drive type I bet) Eventually you reach a stage where it just makes more sense to buy all new stuff at once so it all works together or just buy a whole new PC, perhaps sans monitor because that part changes the least.

You can only build upon an old crappy foundation for so long. Eventually its better to rip down that old house and foundation and build a new one over here instead.

There, I'm out of analogies but I bet you get the picture. There is TOO MUCH to change, TOO MUCH work to do and it would likely entail wiping characters anyway if you REALLY wanted to move the game forward. Something else Dan Enright mentioned was that from the start EQ should have had tradeskills built in and tradeskill items should rival drops. As he said tradeskills were tacked on in the beta, and it shows.

EQ2 is totally different, they learned from their mistakes and its all being done right from the ground up which is something you just can't do with an existing product. Luclin and now Planes of Power are taking EQ to the ZENITH, THE HARD WALL of how much it can change. They already changed more with Luclin then they thought they'd ever be able to improve and they are making all the tradeskill improvements they can with Planes of Power. Once again they are hitting that ceiling though. Things in EQ can't go over 255, that means they have to go through all the work of lowering the trivials near 200 to make room for better planes of power items which will have the new trivials near 250. The room is not there to make skills go higher than 255, or stats, or anything, not without totally rebuilding.

EQ is a dinosaur, eventually it has to evolve yet its evolved as far as it can so its like the dinosaurs in the later part of the Createous period (sp?) They took it as far as they could and then died out. You can't compete with the next generation of MMORPGS with a dinosaur which is limited in how far it can evolve, not when you have the juggernaut blizzard beating down your door with the next generation sure-as-hell-fire 500,000 plus subscribers Worlds of warcraft. The only way to compete with that is to have a BETTER RPG with more to do than the simple more action oriented world of warcraft. you don't compete by trying to figure out ways to get around 7 year old code (EQ was 4 years in the making before it even came out, back when development teams were smaller and projects took much more time)

Its not a question of "Can they instead rebuild EQ? Why make EQ2? Please just rebuild EQ1 with our current characters?", but rather its "how can they afford to NOT do this in today's market?" The answer is, they can't. It has to be done, 2003, in a year and a half is as good a time as any. Four and a half years is more than long enough for this baby to have lived and I'm betting it and UO go down in history as the mmorpgs who lasted the longest. That is a hell of a long time in gaming terms. God, I've not even had a relationship with another human for that long.

Of course EQ will still continue probably until its subscribers dwindle down to nearly nothing, maybe verant will throw a party for them and give them a discount on EQ2 then.
In a year and a half get out your shovel, cause its time to let this thing become a fossil. Have a wake if you want to, the game will certainly have earned it.

AMEN!